The 50 Best’s new picture of the world

Here we are again with The World’s 50 Best Restaurants one week after the announcement. Many are smiling, some are unhappy. For sure, the three at the top are pleased: the Roca brothers, Joan, Josep and Jordi, as they’re once again first, Massimo Bottura who’s moved forward, from third to second place, and even René Redzepi who in fact thought he would loose more than two places. Peruvian Virgilio Martinez, from 15th to 4th place, is also smiling. Same goes for Japanese Yoshihiro Narisawa, from 14th to 8th place.

Daniel Humm, chef and patron in Manhattan, did not smile instead when he found out he slipped backwards, now fifth, -1. Worse was the case of Grant Achatz – from Chicago – from 9th to 26th place when he was in fact expecting to get closer to the top. Truth is lobbies indeed exists, and same goes for preferences, yet you need to know how to use them, have contacts and a strategy even so that they won’t catch you while your filling a copied form.

The United States, for instance, with their 108 votes, had the numbers but little quality, after all. There’s at least one place from the USA every ten or so places (at number 5, 18, 26, 40, 49 and 50), plus 9 more between 51st and 100th, totalling 15 restaurants. Still, if the best roll backwards, it has little importance. Besides, this happens on the eve of moving the ceremony from London to New York, next spring.

In the first 50 places, 7 go to Spain (1-6-13-17-19-39-42) and three more in the second list, a total of 10. Five (+3, a total of 8) go to France, though none are in the top 10 (Mauro Colagreco’s Mirazur is 11th and Alain Passard’sL’Arpège is 12th) and this explains why the haute cuisine française is not crazy about the 50 Best. Our cousins continue to hold their Michelin guide dear, together with a way of judging that is sometimes out-dated yet has been dominating for over a century. Unfortunately for them, between the old and new century, hurricane Adrià arrived and freed plenty of energy and gave success to cuisines that were first relegated inside ethnic cuisine borders and now compete with the best. This happened most of all thanks to the media circus of the 50 Best, whose echoes reach every corner of the globe.

Even though for the past ten years the Red Guide has been reaching new areas, it still remains foreign to entire continents, especially South America. And even when present, as in North America or Asia, it only considers a few metropolises, such as New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, just like in some European cases, as for the Northern Europe. The 50 Best, on the contrary, embraces the world, and this is where their media strength begins, a world divided into 27 areas. Some countries compete solo, as Germany, France and Italy, for instance, others are diluted in larger panels, such as Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe, or Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean Islands.

This democratic approach, making everyone start at the same level, has a dangerous fault in that countries are not weighed based on their gastronomic importance but following global marketing and show business criteria. So while Italy has 332 starred restaurants, it is present three times in the World’s 50 Best, with Massimo Bottura, Enrico Crippa and Massimiliano Alajmo, just like Mexico (Enrique Olvera, the three chefs from Biko, as well as Jorge Vallejo) or Peru (Martinez, Diego Munoz and Mitsuharu Tsumura) where we have generals without an army. This, after all, is also the case of France, with 609 starred restaurants.

Due to our respective histories, we and our cousins would deserve to be divided into two separate groups, for instance from Milan to Florence and from Rome to Ragusa, same from Paris to the North, and from Lyon to Marseille. I’m not the only one to believe this. Unfortunately this would double the number of restaurants from these two lands, penalising the new frontiers which, losing positions in the list, would probably reduce their investment as they wouldn’t be motivated by an excessively Eurocentric list or satisfied with just the 50 Best Asia and South America lists.